For improved performance of manufacturing operations, such as forming, cutting, and grinding processes, it is useful to understand and compensate for dynamic interactions between the processes and machines. Validity and utility of structural analysis based on Finite Element models are dependent on boundary conditions assumed when running simulations. Maintaining process parameters becomes difficult without closed-loop control, especially under high loads and working stresses.
Manufacturing processes often employ monitoring of forces and pressures to ensure that resulting articles of manufacture meet certain specifications of quality. Many of these manufacturing processes do not have adequate physical space where sensors can be placed without interfering with the manufacturing processes. Alteration of the process to accommodate sensor wiring can be expensive and time consuming. Likewise, wires for either power or communications, running to and from the sensors, can disrupt the manufacturing processes by occupying limited free space. In addition, wires have a potential to get tangled with moving or non-moving parts, further disrupting the manufacturing processes.
Sensors also generally cannot communicate, in a robust manner, wirelessly through radio frequency (RF) within manufacturing processes because most manufacturing machines employ steel or other RF-blocking metals, rendering RF communications unreliable or ineffective.
Some manufacturing processes use mechanical slip rings to communicate information wirelessly across rotating or translating mechanical interfaces and transfer power. Slip rings, in their current form, use metal contacts that rotate or translate relative to each other that tend to add electrical noise to signals. In addition, slip rings wear over time, adding more electrical noise or loss-of-signal errors, thereby requiring replacement and stoppage of the corresponding manufacturing process. Likewise slip rings, by a natural wearing process, produce a fine particulate dust which can be disruptive in clean working environments.